My Murdered Cousin Had a Name

Friday, for me, was a bit surreal. As America was celebrating the victory of marriage equality at the Supreme Court, it was also mourning black people in South Carolina murdered by a white supremacist.

All the while I thought about a cousin of mine who was murdered years ago. We grew up in the same segregated Louisiana hamlet of about a thousand people. Everyone said that he was gay (only they used pejoratives in place of that word) because of the way he carried himself and the fact that he didn’t date women or marry one.

However, he never addressed his sexuality in my presence. It was not a thing that in that time and place one proclaimed. Small, rural communities like ours maintained their own, unwritten Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell protocols. He simply lived by his own terms.

And yet, my cousin’s difference became more evident to me when he started to stop by the small upholstery shop down the street where one of my brothers was an apprentice and where I sometimes visited.

As I wrote in my memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”:

“Lawrence felt at ease coming to the shop and saying things there that he didn’t say elsewhere, the air always pregnant with a ‘maybe.’ Maybe he was flirting. Maybe not. If he went too far, maybe that would be okay. Maybe he was being mocked. Maybe he was being entertaining. Maybe, just maybe. He knew the things he was saying were dangerous, because just being himself was dangerous. He was operating outside the rules.”

Others like Lawrence hid more or lived in repression more.

“But not Lawrence. He wouldn’t pretend. He wouldn’t hide.”

In the book I called him Lawrence, but that was not his name. One of my mother’s only requests was that I change everyone’s names. She was expressly worried about publishing “Lawrence’s” name. I acquiesced.

You see, more than a decade after I remember him coming to the upholstery shop, he was found murdered — tied to a bed — in a neighboring town. The gossip was that his life had been taken because of the way he had lived it. To my knowledge, no one was ever charged with that murder. Such were the dangers of being both black and different.

In a 1984 interview, when my cousin and I both still lived in that small town, James Baldwin was asked about the roots of homophobia. He responded: “Terror, I suppose. Terror of the flesh.”

But when living black gayness, or any similar otherness, in America, that terror of flesh is doubled. You are on the margins of the margin.

For, you see, even in gayness, blackness is set apart. As Baldwin put it:

“A black gay person who is a sexual conundrum to society is already, long before the question of sexuality comes into it, menaced and marked because he’s black or she’s black. The sexual question comes after the question of color; it’s simply one more aspect of the danger in which all black people live.”

Baldwin concluded:

“The gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society.”

My cousin’s life and death underscored this duality for me:

“Five years after Lawrence was tied to the bed and killed, Matthew Shepard, a young, white, openly gay man, was tied to a fence and killed in a small Wyoming city. While Lawrence’s death hardly made the local papers, Matthew’s provoked an international outcry. That discrepancy would haunt me.”

My cousin’s name was Larry, and he was kind and beautiful and brave and worthy. That name, more than ever, deserves to be written, spoken, celebrated, not because he was famous or because he lived a remarkable life. It deserves to be spoken because he did not. His anonymity gives his name all the more power, because he could have been anyone.

Larry lived a kind of amplified erasure: black and nonhetero-normative. And, he lived it as boldly as he could at a time when it was dangerous to do so and in a place where there was little support or protection.

I wish that Larry had survived to see a time when the country was fighting to affirm both parts of his identity, fighting to acknowledge that his black life mattered and his love life mattered. I wish he had lived to see more people come to understand the intersectionality of oppression — that racism and homophobia are born of the same beast.

I wish he could have lived to proudly proclaim his difference and have his halves reconciled.

I wish he had lived to see the day that society — and indeed the law — didn’t attempt to diminish a person’s dignity based on how they articulated the parameters of their attraction or lived the reality of their intimacy.

I wish he had lived to see a black president eulogize a black man killed and also advocate for the full and rich lives that L.G.B.T.Q. people live. I wish Larry had lived to see Friday.